Stay on Top of Key E-Mails, Anywhere

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Imagine if you could be notified on your cell phone whenever you receive an e-mail from a particular person or on a subject of interest to youeven when you're out on the street, or in a restaurant or storeand read a brief text-message summary of the message to determine whether it warrants an immediate response. You can, and it's not hard. All you need to turn your PC into an e-mail processing server is a computer connected full-time to the Internet, standard software, and a Visual Basic macro to glue it all together. Getting your PC to send you such customized messages could be a great help in keeping you organized and responsive. The system we'll create ignores spam and alerts you only to the information you want to receive.

You don't need any fancy software to set this up; Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Outlook 2003 can handle the job with ease. You can also use Windows XP Home or Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3. (Our solution will not work with other e-mail clients because the script is specific to Outlook, but the concept could be carried over to any e-mail client with a scripting language capable of performing these tasks. Outlook Express is not able to run the script.) We recommend that you have a full-time broadband Internet connection, a hardware firewall/router, anti-virus software, and a UPS backup device.

Here's the idea: Using the Visual Basic scripting language that's built into Outlook, we'll write macro programming statements that will automatically scan every e-mail that arrives in your Inbox, checking for specific senders or identifying information you define. The macro then constructs a unique message containing the sender's name, the e-mail subject, and a portion of text from the body of the message. Finally, the messages are sent to your cell phone. When you receive the text message on your phone, not only do you know you have an e-mail from someone you want to hear from, but you will also get a general idea of its content. You are in control of the information that is forwarded to your phone.

The first step is to configure Outlook 2003 to check your e-mail accounts periodically. Set Outlook so that it is always running (see screenshot at upper right). Then start the Visual Basic editor from within Outlook by selecting Tools | Macro | Visual Basic Editor. On the left side of the Visual Basic editor there is a project window, with Project1 listed by default. Clicking the plus sign next to Project1 will extend the tree to display Microsoft Office Outlook Objects; clicking the plus sign next to that will show ThisOutlookSession. Clicking on ThisOutlookSession will open another window where the entire script can be pasted in. (You can download it at go.pcmag.com/emailserver). Lines that start with an apostrophe and are green in the screenshot are comments that describe the purpose of each subsequent statement. Some lines need to be modified with your specific information, as indicated.

In our Visual Basic script, whenever Outlook receives new e-mail the function called ApplicationNewMail() is triggered; it checks each message for your customized identifying information. When the function finds a message matching your criteria, it creates a new SMS message with your e-mail address in the From line. As the script is now written, the Subject line includes the sender's name and part of the subject, and the message body contains a portion of the message text. After the message has been processed, it is marked as read so that it will be ignored the next time new e-mail is received. Though Outlook natively can use rules to forward messages to another e-mail address, it can't on its own extract particular characters from a message and form a new message with unique text and only selected portions of the original message. Thus, our Visual Basic script allows you much more control over how information is presented to you.

The script's main purpose is to reduce the size of the original message for use on phones while retaining important information. The areas you need to customize include the e-mail address to which text messages for your cell phone are sent, the e-mail addresses of the people whose messages you want to be alerted to, the keywords that you want to trigger an alert, and what portions of the text you want transmitted to you. For example, you can receive part of the Subject line or body of the original e-mail, or substitute other keywords that signify what you would like to receive. In our screen shots, we show places where the data can be modified. Follow the commented lines in the script to determine what information needs to be customized, and feel free to explore other modifications. A typical format for an e-mail address for sending SMS messages to your phone is [10digitphonenumber]@messaging.[yourcellprovider].com, but check with your carrier for the exact format.

You can receive alerts for e-mails that contain your chosen keywords in their subject lines even if they come from people other than those on your e-mail alert list. In selecting such keywords, you don't want to pick words that spammers might put in the subject, or you'll be alerted to a lot of junk messages, too.

When you've completed work on your macro, go to the menu and select Debug | Compile Project1 to verify there are no syntax errors. If there are no errors, go to File | Save and then close the Visual Basic editor. There are two ways to enable the macro to run. You could lower the macro security setting within Outlook to Low (choose Tools | Macro | Security from Outlook's menu). But once you change this security setting, all the macros that your system encounters in any e-mail, including potentially harmful ones, could run freely, making it particularly crucial that you have a good antivirus program on your PC. Alternatively, you could keep the macro security setting on High and create your own digital signature, and then add yourself to your list of trusted publishers.

To create a digital signature, from the Start button go to Programs, then Microsoft Office Tools, and click on Digital Certificate for VBA Projects. Name the certificate whatever you want. To apply it, while in the Visual Basic Editor select Tools | Digital Signature to display the Digital Signature dialog. Click on the Choose button and select the name of the certificate that you just created. Click OK. Click OK again to close the dialog. Close Outlook and restart it for the change to take effect. When the script is run for the very first time, a security warning dialog will appear. Check Always trust macros from this publisher and click on the Enable Macros button.

The timely receipt of key e-mail messages may be vital to keeping your projects on track. By setting your PC up as an e-mail processing server, you can be sure you are quickly alerted to messages that meet your criteria, even when you are on the road.

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Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service